I've made no secret on this blog of my disdain for Sen Joe Biden. I realize that the man is somewhat of an expert on foreign policy, but when it comes to domestic affairs, his record has been atrocious. Which is why an idiotic comment like this doesn't surprise me in the least:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
As Josh's readers over at TPM have pointed out, it is entirely possible that one of the major problems with this comment is a missing comma. If the transcript was edited as follows, the substance of the comment would be very different:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
But let's be honest... that doesn't really save him, does it? This is, after all, a man who not that long ago gave a speech in South Carolina declaring that Delaware would have been better off had it been part of the Confederacy. And that was a prepared speech, mind you, not an off the cuff remark like the one he made today. Or, for that matter, this one he made previously:
All that said, in the end this is largely irrelevant. Biden will be neither the presidential nor vice presidential nominee in 2008.
UPDATE: Via TPM, we now have access to the audio of the interview. Listen for yourself.
Josh thinks that Biden's use of the word "clean" clearly means that Obama is not tainted by corruption." I have to be honest here - that's not what I thought when I read it, or when I hear it. And now that Josh has proposed that interpretation, I still don't see it that way. The word "clean," after all, comes just before nice-looking, and just after "articulate and bright." Biden was talking about Obama's personal characteristics, not his political process-related attributes. And c'mon... articulate? and mainstream? As if we're supposed to be surprised that an African American could be either of those things? Yes yes, of course, there are still some people who would be surprised by that. But that's the whole point here, isn't it?
Now, it is of course entirely possible that the full transcript of the interview would include something that indicates he was in fact talking about corruption. But until I see that, I don't see any reason why I should assume that was what he meant, and I see several reasons, including a few right in the very same sentence itself - why I should assume it wasn't.
UPDATE II: Check out Wolcott's take:
Obama: He's No Funky NegroHigh praise indeed from Joe Biden, whose hairplugs seem to have made hazardous inroads into his brain (via Atrios).
Ouch.
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